“Distinguished Ladies” and the Doctrine of Womanhood: Auto-surveillance and Autoperformance in Diamela Eltit’s E. Luminata

Abstract

Phillipe Lejeune reminds us that “[i]n spite of the fact that autobiography is impossible, this in no way prevents it from existing” (132-3). Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in a history of women’s writing about their lives under dictatorship in which the impossible autobiographical act is not only complicated by the linguistic and narratological confines of self-portraiture, but is also impeded by the oppressive surveillance and censorship of totalitarianism. Although the autobiographical voice is, perhaps, the most powerful device for offering testimony of human rights violations under the absolute power of dictatorship, it is also the most impossible because it is the least likely to see print. And yet, impossible autobiographies written under curfew, in captivity, and other repressive circumstances of dictatorship, prove to adapt and replicate in resilient forms of resistance to tyranny in spite of their own impossibility. They give way to forms of autobiographical inscription that are not only outlaws of genre and convention but also public offenses punishable by death. This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on October 19th 2015 and published on October 17th 2017.